Thanks for the link.

That LogicTutor site you linked to provides a good, basic introduction to a few concepts and fallacies. However, the practice problems just ask you to identify which fallacy is in the sentence they give you. They're missing the other half of the game, which is spotting the fallacy in a block of text that's deliberately designed to hide the fallacy. I'll keep looking in case someone has already made a game that contains this part.

One way to make the game more fun would be to have interesting text to find the fallacy in. Eliezer's short stories are a good example of this. Though for the purpose of the game, we would need just short segments of stories, which contain one clear example of a fallacy. Preferably one that's well-hidden, but obvious once you see it. Also, to keep players on their toes, we could include segments that don't actually contain a fallacy, and players would have the option of saying that there is no fallacy.

And as I mentioned before, another idea is to flesh out the stories even more, so that it could be expanded into a mystery game, or an adventure game, or an escape-the-room game, where in order to continue you need to talk to people, and some of these people will give inaccurate information, because they didn't notice a flaw in their own reasoning, and you will need to point out the flaw in their reasoning before they will give you the accurate information.

You would also have to choose your replies during the conversation, and have to choose a reply that doesn't introduce a new fallacy and send the conversation off in the wrong direction. Many of the possible responses would be to question why the person believes specific things that they just said. Maybe there could also be a feature where you could interrupt the person in the middle of what they're saying, to point out the problem. Optionally, score the player based on how long they took, and how many wrong paths they went down before finding the correct path.

And if this still doesn't make the game fun, then there are ways to make people want to play games even if they aren't fun.

One way is to make the not-so-fun game into a small but necessary part of a bigger game, that is fun.

Another way is to make it into a Flash game, and submit it to a site that tracks your achievements in the games, and gives you an overall score over all the games you've played. Examples of sites like this are Kongregate.com, and Newgrounds.com. If you're lucky, the game might even get to spend a few days on the site's front page, or get a limited-time challenge, for extra bonus points.

If the game could be made into a series, that would be even better.

So far I've only seen one "educational" game get promoted to the front page of Kongragate.com, with its own limited-time-only challenge. That was Globetrotter XL. The game says the name of a city, and you have to click on where that city is, on a map of the world with no border lines or labels. You're scored for how close you click to the actual city. Unfortunately, I ended up not completing this game's limited-time challenge, because the game was so unforgiving, and my knowledge of geography was so poor.

Anyway, while it would be a really nice bonus if the spot-the-fallacy game became popular outside LW, the main purpose of the game is to give current LW members an objective way to test their rationality, even if the game isn't especially fun.

There have been several LW posts now talking about how desperately we need a way to measure our rationality, and so far I haven't seen any serious proposals that anyone is actually working on. Or maybe there's a project already started, and I just didn't notice it because I got so far behind on reading the LW posts.

This game/quiz/whatever is a proposal for a way to go from having no objective way to measure our rationality, to at least having something.